Novels We Could Never Write
By Kim Bullock | October 23, 2017 |
Flickr Creative Commons: Lars Von Wedel
The helicopters are out in force again. The whir of propellers has become so commonplace since the morning of October 7th that the sound has faded into the background, a white noise machine only heard when the power’s cut.
Today it’s two news helicopters, and they’ve hovered over a field a couple miles due west of my house from mid-morning until nightfall, a field I’ve driven by daily since 3-year-old Sherin Mathews disappeared. I pass by her neighborhood, an enclave of McMansions one subdivision northwest of where I live, each time I mail a letter or go to the grocery store. If I look south while crossing the railroad tracks I can see the tree beside which Sherin’s adoptive father apparently made her stand at 3AM as punishment for not drinking her milk. It stands maybe fifty feet from the track, clearly visible from a busy street, in an area coyotes often roam. People leave flowers and balloons and hold prayer vigils, though the police dogs have all but proved she was never there.
It doesn’t matter that the smiling little girl seen in the news reports isn’t white or that she was born in another country. It doesn’t matter that she has developmental issues or that she has a limited ability to speak. She’s the community’s daughter now and the air grows heavier with each passing day she isn’t found. Things like this don’t happen in this area of Dallas, at least not in the twenty years I’ve lived here.
We’re all holding our breath.
Sherin Mathews – still missing
When police reported one of the family’s three cars had been missing between 4 and 5 AM on the morning of Sherin’s disappearance, I gave up all hope she’d be found alive. “That proves it,” I said to my pre-teen daughter. “He killed her and removed the evidence.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Mama,” she said. “Isn’t it possible that he searched near the house, didn’t find her, and then took the car out to look?”
I’ve run the toddler-gauntlet twice and know that any three-year-old left alone outside at night would scream loud enough to wake the neighbors. Any father, upon finding his child gone, would at the very least wake his wife, who reportedly slept through the whole ordeal. He’d call the police and pound on neighbors’ doors, organizing a search party. He would not, as he claimed, do laundry and wait for her to turn back up. For five hours.
I bit my tongue, though, because my daughter asked a valid question. It WAS possible he had an innocent reason to leave the house, just as he had a plausible reason to attempt to give the girl milk in the middle of the night. (Her developmental issues required her to eat often.)
My daughter and I had both heard every publicly known detail of the father’s story. One of us was willing to suspend disbelief enough to objectively consider all possible motives. The other will not easily be convinced the man does not deserve to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
As a mother, I’m horrified by what has likely happened to this child.
As a writer, though, I’m intrigued.
Why would a wealthy, highly educated man tell such an easily disproved, self-incriminating story? Is there a grain of truth embedded in the lie? Perhaps it was his night to ensure Sherin ate, and he got angry when she resisted the easiest option at hand? Perhaps he lashed out and it was all a horrible accident? Perhaps he feared, being a minority man, he’d get an unfair trial in a death penalty state? Was it premeditated murder and he hoped confessing to an act of child endangerment would lead the police astray long enough to prevent a body being found? Was he protecting someone else? His wife?
I’ll likely never know the answer to these questions, but any of these scenarios could spark a compelling novel. A novel I can’t write.
As writers, we are hard-wired to untangle the motives and intentions of our characters, to give meaning behind things that, at first glance, might seem inexplicable. We attempt to inspire sympathy even when characters behave despicably. It’s a bit like method acting, and most of us have a few dark pathways into the human mind we’ll do anything to avoid exploring, much less remaining in for a year or more. Some might argue those are the very places we should shine a light into – waving at Don Maass – and I know I’ll be forced to walk some of them in my next novel, but there will remain one shadowy alcove I’ll pass by with eyes firmly closed.
There are some things I don’t want to understand.
Over to you. Have you ever found yourself imagining a novel you knew you could not write? Under what circumstances might you change your mind? What dark pathways do you avoid?
Note: Since writing this post, there has been a heartbreaking development in the case. At around 11:00 AM on 10/22 the body of a small child was discovered in a culvert under a bridge by the intersection of Spring Valley and Bowser Road in Richardson. The child’s remains have now been identified as Sherin Mathews. This intersection is maybe a quarter mile from the child’s home. Due to the close proximity of the crime scene to my house, I learned of the discovery from frantic neighbors about 90 minutes before the RPD press conference. On 10/23, Wesley Mathews and his lawyer showed up at the Richardson Police Station and he offered an “alternate story” from what he originally told police. He has confessed to giving the child milk in their garage and when she resisted, he “physically assisted” her. She then started to cough and choke and died. He further confessed to removing the body from the home. He has been arrested and charged with Injury to a Child (a first degree felony). Police have said this charge may change and that other arrests may be made depending on where the investigation leads them.
[coffee]
Kim (she/her) has an M.A. in English from Iowa State University. She writes mainly historical fiction, though has also contributed non-fiction articles to historical and Arts and Crafts publications in both the United States and Canada. She has just finished The Oak Lovers, a novel based on the rather colorful life of her great-grandfather, landscape painter Carl Ahrens.
Kim, this is just awful. I’m so sorry for little Sherin, her family, and your community. Praying for you all. I think it can take a decade or two to process something like this, before you can tell the story with a little bit of distance. However, if you’re a journalist, this is the kind of story you won’t let go of. You’ll dig and dig until you find the answers. Call it a sense of justice, to know the truth.
Vijaya,
Missing children cases always get to me, but it was impossible not to feel personally invested in the outcome when I heard the helicopters every day, when the footage on the news showed fields and train tracks I know well. They found her in a culvert under a bridge that I’ve gone over at least twice since she went missing. If I ever use any part of this story, it will be a long time from now.
This is such a compelling post, and evokes so perfectly the sort of situation that gets the creative mind cranking. But oh god, Kim, the thought of you traveling over that culvert, not knowing what is lying below, is so chilling. There are so many compelling and provocative details in this post, and I’m sure each reader will hone in on a different one, and each writer choose to spin the story that grabs his/her interest the most. Couldn’t we all write “some” version of this story, focusing on different angles and born though our own eyes? But this one from your response to Vijaya really grabbed me.
Kathryn,
I knew about the discovery (and where it was) a good hour and a half before the press conference announcing it. That neighborhood is walking distance from me, and so I see messages posted on the Nextdoor website from there. The area she was found isn’t remote at all. The crime scene is visible from a row of townhouses on one side of the track and houses on the other. The body was apparently discovered by two people out walking their dog. I’m not sure that Sherin’s remains had always been there, since I can’t imagine that area hadn’t been searched. You can almost see her home from there, just down the track. We had a bad storm the night before and rainwater might have carried her there. Maybe it just moved her enough to make her visible.
The sound of helicopters has become such an anxiety trigger now.
I learned another detail yesterday from neighbors who know the family involved and it makes the story even more chilling. Apparently CPS has been called to the house before, but it was because of the mother, not the father. She has said nothing through this whole thing.
I admire you even more now for being able to write The Far Side of Happy.
I agree. I have a hard time reading or watching movies with this premise, so I rarely do. And there are some things I will never write.
Since I do write some horror, I could write about this subject, but I don’t think I would ever get clean of it. I feel that it would take a part of my soul.
That’s it exactly, Val. It would take a part of my soul, especially if I wrote from the perspective of the person who killed the child.
I’ve watched this story from afar, Kim, like you with the ultimate fear. And I’m with you, I could not write about this. I was just talking to a friend about this very thing, wondering if my skirting of my biggest fears, not writing about the things that are the darkest in my mind, is what’s keeping me from going as far as I could with my fiction. It’s not so much *only* that I avoid the things that terrify me (like child abductions, danger to children in general) but also that maybe I hold myself back from writing in ways I could, in ways I’m not even aware. Does that make sense? I’ve often wondered if I just don’t “go there,” as the saying goes. I think this post really goes to the heart of that for me. And I totally get it. I’m intrigued, want to know, but I’m also quite sure I wouldn’t be able to examine it enough to write about it. Great questions, Kim.
I had no doubt in my mind that there was going to be a “recovery” instead of a “rescue.” This little girl was tiny – only 22 pounds – and required a specialized diet. Nothing about this story has made sense from the start, and each new detail leads not to answers, but to more questions.
For the most part, I agree that “going there” creates some of the best, most powerful writing we are capable of. As I mentioned, I’ll have to do this in my next novel, at least to an extent. That will involve a child, too, but it will be an incident in a scene. Important, but not a central theme.
We’ll have time in a car together soon. If you want a sounding board for the specifics in your novel, and the ways you are holding back, I’m more than happy to be a sounding board.
Absolutely heartbreaking :(…… In terms of the writing question, though, for me it is in some ways *easier* (you know what I mean) to go to this place because I’m not a parent. In my WIP, in fact, there is an abduction of an infant… But I also think that it’s an interesting exercise to think about situations/characters you feel you could never write about or embody and try doing it. Stretching the comfort zones.
In a way I have “gone there” by writing this post, at least to a degree. I’m not sure I could do it in fiction, though, at least not from the point of view of anyone who would harm a child.
I once had to write a scene about a two year old dying (from an illness). It the time I had a two year old, and the only way I could write the scene effectively was to give the dying child characteristics of my own child. It took me three months to work up the courage to do it, but I managed. It’s one of the strongest things I’ve ever written. I would not have been able to do it, though, if the novel centered around that child.
Thank you so much for commenting!
A horrible tragedy and a provocative question to us. I have been haunted by the story a year or so ago about the little 2-year-old boy who wandered away from his grandmother’s house in Tennessee and was eventually found dead in the woods within a mile of where everyone was searching. I can’t get it out of my head, and I desperately wish I could. I truly don’t think I could ever write about something like that happening to a child. I would never want to spend time in the minds of the parents and friends searching. I could never write those scenes.
So I have to conclude that, just because something haunts me doesn’t mean I’m meant to write about it. Certainly there are some things that haunt me — big questions with no easy answers — that I want to write about. But those stories will involve adults or teenagers, not little children.
And frankly, I’m not sure how many of us want to read stories about child victims. I read Beasts of No Nation because the author is a good friend’s brother-in-law. It was a wonderfully written book, but I felt sick as I read it. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the movie.
Hi Erin,
Oh, that would be an awful story to have floating around in your head. I shudder just thinking about it.
I have to admit that I will generally shy away from reading stories about child victims unless there is some reason I feel like the story is going to teach me something, say a story about the Holocaust or a lesser known historical truth, such as in the novel Orphan Train. A glaring exception was The Lovely Bones, which garnered so much word-of-mouth press that I felt I should read it.
Thank you for commenting!
Kim, that’s a relentlessly sad and horrible story. I wouldn’t have the resources to move something of that darkness into my own fictional world.
But I was moved over and over while reading The Lovely Bones, a work that digs right into the sickness and horror of humans behaving badly, of murder and perversion. A hard work to read—and I wonder how Alice Sebold pushed herself through it—but one told with striking emotional power.
The Lovely Bones slayed me. I still remember the image at the end of the first chapter when the knife “smiled” at Susie. I shudder just thinking about that. I think what got me through the book was that Susie, as narrator, still seemed alive, even though she wasn’t. I’ve read Alice Sebold’s other book, too, and I believe that she wrote The Lovely Bones from a real place of trauma, a sort of alternate reality for what might have happened to her, had she not lived through her own attack. She may have written about the experience in order to survive it.
I know I couldn’t live in that dark place without doing irreparable harm to my soul.
Thank you for commenting, Tom!
Alice Sebold pushed through it, because she was raped while in college. She wrote a book about it entitled LUCKY (nonfiction). I was intrigued by both of her books, her ability to lash out at a society that allows these things to happen. She used THE LOVELY BONES to present the issue again, this time using her incredible talent to write fiction. I confess my novel is about a child abduction. Erin Bartels has read a version of it. In 1983 a ten-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped and murdered in a suburb of Chicago. I was raising two daughters. That story haunted me then and for years afterward. I wrote pieces about protecting one’s children. And eventually it became the kernel for my novel. I even wanted to dedicate the novel to this child and when Isabelle Bloom created a statue to raise money for a cause put forward by the family, I bought one. So thanks, Kim, for sharing your experience and feelings. Fiction can fuel anger and futility, but it can also fuel a way to fight back. I believe I am doing that. Or maybe I am just releasing demons that have, like Sebold, forced me to the keyboard–though her agony outweighs mine.
Beth,
I can certainly understand how stories like this can affect writers in different ways, Beth. I felt absolutely compelled to write today’s post on the topic; at the time, with helicopters flying overhead, there was no room in my mind for anything else. I’m sure this experience, in some way, will find its way into my fiction. I may not write about this topic, but the emotions it brought out in me could certainly be mined in the future.
Thank you for commenting!
Such a valid point, Kim, that the emotion can work its way onto the page–but the topic will be different. You pulled a lot out of me this morning. See, my emotions are still raw when it comes to kidnapping. Thanks.
That is a very good way to see it – that the intensity of these emotions will be translated somehow at some point in something you write. I think that, as fiction writers, we sometimes write stories about circumstances that are standing in for something else. Drill down, and the truth is in the emotional resonance, even though the outside circumstances might be different (ie. in The Lovely Bones, the sexual assault/murder of a child, echoing Sebold’s own terrifying adult experience of rape). In a way, we’re like method actors. Thank you for this very interesting conversation.
Kim – But the chances are great that you will write about it in some way. Maybe not deliberately, maybe not directly (aside from this post), and maybe not for five, ten, twenty years, but some aspect of this experience, some physical or emotional detail will wend its way into your writing at some point. We can’t divorce ourselves from our experiences, from what brings us pain, not if we what to write what’s honest, true, and whole, regardless of genre.
That’s absolutely, true, Heidi. This experience has granted me (for lack of a better word) a whole new emotion to tap into. That, I’m sure, will come out somewhere, in some way.
There are stories I am not qualified to write, but few that (if qualified) I would not. With one exception.
As an adoptive dad, I am put off by the number of adoption-gone-wrong novels out there. Adoption is on one level a tragedy–and is certainly a trauma for the child–but in most cases it goes right, long term, and benefits the child. It has done so for my kids.
Adoption-gone-wrong is a handy, off-the-shelf plot device but one that for an insider like me is simplistic and even offensive. I see now why we need sensitivity reads.
Even though I am qualified, I would not write a novel revolving around adoption. What I want is for adopted people to be presented as normal, not damaged. Adopted kids are not victims, but brave hearts, demon slayers and world makers. They deserve better than they are getting from fiction writers nowadays.
As for adoptive parents, the Sherin Mathews case is real, and horrible, and bad publicity for adoption parenting, but it is the exception not a trope. There’s plenty of stinking parenting of bio kids, too. But as you say, stories are complex. They have many sides.
When we choose difficult topics, what gives stories their power is not easy black-and-white morality but the complex, shifting light of truth.
Hi Benjamin,
The news stories, of course, are making a big deal of the fact that Sherin was adopted, almost like that is some sort of explanation for what happened. Little is said of her developmental handicaps and lack of communication skills which, I would think, would be a much greater source of tension in the home. Had their biological child had these issues, the same thing could have happened.
I wince at how the constant harping on the fact that she wasn’t their natural child must be making people who have adopted or are adopted feel. The vast majority of the time, adoptions go well for both parent and child.
On a side note, there was a hearing today because Sherin’s parents are trying to regain custody of their biological child. The request was denied.
Thank you for commenting and sharing your perspective. It’s an important one to keep in mind.
One thing I discovered in a previous novel I wrote: I can, and did, describe (briefly) the cruel killing of a pet dog, but I could not do the same for a cat. I’m a cat guy, through and through.
We all have our limits, David. Interesting how that works.
Like you, I could never write about someone deliberately harming a young child. Just trying to imagine the mindset of such a person is too unsettling. I think the natural instinct of “normal” adults is to protect children.
As I’ve mentioned on WU before, I’m writing stories for my grandchildren, each featuring one of them as the protagonist. One of the hardest things about writing these stories has been creating conflict or predicaments for them to overcome because I don’t like imagining them anything other than perfectly happy all the time. While they haven’t read their own stories, I do use the siblings and cousins as “mini” beta readers to get some kids’ feedback (they are all avid readers, with definite likes and dislikes, so I trust them).
Your post reminded me of a comment I recently posted about how differently children see the world. A few months ago, I took an online short-story course, working on one of these stories for the class. One day this past summer, I told my eleven year-old grandson (who’s also started writing his own stories) about the class, and that because of the word count limit I had had to quickly devise a new ending. After agreeing to read the new version, he said, “Wanna know a fast way to end a story, Gram? Just have everyone die.”
Gram: “What?!”
Grandson: “You know. Like have everyone climb a mountain and after they get to the top, there’s an accident and they all fall off. If they were on a mountain and fell off, that would be realistic.”
Gram: “I couldn’t have one of you kids die! I couldn’t write something like that!”
Grandson: “Why not? You’re just making it all up anyway.”
The past few months there have been many times when I’ve been stunned by how grown-up he’s becoming…and then there are times like this when I’m reminded of just how young he still is.
So much of middle grade and YA literature is quite dark, so your grandson’s comment comes as no surprise – I have a preteen and a teen myself. He has a point, too. That would certainly end the story. LOL.
Hi Kim….Seeing there were comments posted after mine, I stopped to read them, and also just re-read my comment from yesterday and realized it seems a little flippant given the gravity of the events that prompted your post. I assure you, I didn’t mean to be in any way dismissive of what you and your community are going through. I hope you understand that I was just trying to answer your question from my perspective ( I could never write about anyone deliberately or thoughtlessly harming a child) and from a child’s more pragmatic perspective. You might not have been surprised by his answer, but I was shocked. I did try explaining to him that even though I make up the stories, the feelings I have while writing them are real, and he tried to understand, but I’m not sure he does just yet. At any rate, I simply want to say what I should have said yesterday: I’m so sorry for what you and your neighbors are going through.
CK,
I never thought you were flippant. No worries! I’m trying to figure out who you were having this discussion with? Did I miss something in this thread?
Kim,
Thank you. It’s so easy these days to send words out into the world before really considering the many ways they might be interpreted (or misinterpreted).
You didn’t miss a thread in this discussion. Re-reading my original comment, it was the inclusion of the anecdote about my grandson that seemed out of place, or “flippant”. (Perhaps “inappropriate” would have been a better word choice.) When I wrote “from a child’s more pragmatic perspective” I was referring to my grandson’s how to advice for quickly ending a story.
Having muddled this discussion so well, I hope I have now un-muddled it a bit. And, I hope things are getting back to normal in Texas.
.
Heartbreaking post, Kim. I’ve been following this story via your FB updates and felt the same way that you did, but I still found myself hoping against hope.
I hoped right until I heard that one of the parents’ cars had been missing between 4 and 5 AM on the morning of her disappearance. At that point I knew if would be a recovery, not a rescue. So heartbreaking where she ended up.
I weep with all of you in the death of that baby. There is no way mitigate or unremembering it, whether it is Sherrin or not. I presume it is.
I only understand the deaths of children, of anybody, in terms that only Holy God will judge the perpetrator. Where was He in the moments that the little girl was suffering to her final end? Where He always is. Why did He not prevent it? Only He can say, and He has not chosen to tell me today why or why not this little one suffered.
It is the same process I am going through to write the novel I want to write before I die. My great-great-great Grandmother survived both the Sand Creek Massacre and the attack of the coward Custer’s attack on Black Kettle’s camp with his 7th Cavalry on the morning of November 27, 1868. The latter attack is the one re-enacted in Dustin Hoffman’s movie Little Big Man. The part of all of it is, that Custer ordered the attack despite a promise to Black Kettle that the U.S. Army would not attack him or his band if they flew the American flag over their tepees. Black Kettle and his wife were killed as the Stars and Stripes flapped over the Cheyenne camping grounds. (In the several viewings of the movie I attended, after the attack, the theater is deathly quiet, for the rest of the movie, and as the patrons departed up the aisles to the exits.)
Ten years later, the Lakota, Dakota, Brule, the Cheyennes, and other tribal groups, exacted revenge on the coward Custer and his cowardly 7th. Interestingly enough, battle field archaeologists have determined that there may not have been a so-called Last Stand of by the Cowardly Custer at all. He may have simply sat on Custer Ridge, watching his troopers die by the dozens until the Indian warriors turned on him and his command officers. The archaeologists found very little ammunition evidence that many shots were fire in defense of themselves from Custer Ridge by troopers or Custer’s officers.
Now, the 7th Cavalry is the unit portrayed in the movie, We Were Soldiers, starring Mel Gibson, based on the book, the book by Lt General Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and journalist Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. Despite the fact that many my age lost friends, classmates, schoolmates, teammates, cruiser buds, and even girlfriends, wives, and sisters, in the war in Vietnam, there was a part of me during the movie that sort of sympathized with, and supported, the Vietnamese. Oh, I didn’t root for the Vietnamese soldiers or their commander. I would just have seen it some justice that the Cowardly 7th would buy it again in Vietnam. But my feelings changed. Amazingly. When the scriptwriter had Colonel Moore distance himself from Custer by the words of Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, played by Sam Elliott, I suddenly knew and wanted Col. Moore and the rest of the 7th to survive. Moore and many did. Many did not.
It is that respect/hatred relationship that I have with the the 7th, and the despise/not despise relationship with Custer that I have (which I should not have because of the words of the Lord Jesus Christ) that make it difficult for me to write the novel.
So, I hesitate to write a novel based on life of my great-great-great Grandmother, A-gope-tah. I have even given though to see if I could crowdfund a research/writing trip to the site of Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in southeastern Colorado for a non-fiction book on the massacre. Because I am now an old man, I would need to my Wife and oldest Son to go with me. It would probably not be practical go take a two-week trip and expect them to enjoy themselves puttering around a motel while I did my research.
So, I am not certain I will ever do the novel. I would like to. But to confront those who tried to kill A-gope-tah might just be too brutal and unnerving an experience. Who knows? My hesitation perhaps will be overcome. At this point, I don’t think so.
My condolence to the parents and family of little Sherrin. I am so sorry.
Jim Porter
Hi Jim,
I can certainly understand your hesitation to write the novel, but if the story won’t let you go, there may be a reason for that. I’m currently writing a novel about my great-grandparents for just that reason. I’ve felt deeply connected to their story since I was a child.
There’s now another shrine up – this time at the place where the child’s body was found. The police have good reason to believe it is her, though a positive ID has not been made yet, as far as I know. Yesterday her father went to the police and offered an alternate version of what happened to her than he had originally said. He has been arrested and charged with 1st degree Injury to a Child. The police have indicated the charge could change and that “others” may be arrested as well. I can only assume they mean the mother.
Thank you for your powerful post, Kim. I no longer need to trim my fingernails today. I do, however, need to buy more tissues.
Up until about a year ago, I had always written thrillers that pass for dark comedies. Then my wife went on a humanitarian trip to Cambodia to help build an art center for young girls who’d been rescued from sex trafficking. When she described the what these girls (some as young as six) had been through, I knew I had a novel I couldn’t write.
So I wrote it.
I had little choice. My muse is a bit disturbed—and persistent. It was either I write the novel or allow her to keep waking me up in the middle of the night to remind me of the horrors I was trying to ignore.
At least I found a positive route into the nightmare of child sex trafficking. The book focuses on a team that travels the globe as undercover “sex tourists” to rescue trafficking victims and lock away perpetrators. (There are teams/organizations that do this in real life.) Research for the book made me nauseous. Writing it, however, felt cathartic, redemptive.
It wasn’t easy, but I’m glad I “went there.” Doing so satisfied my crazy muse, but more importantly, it pulled my head out of the sand. Hopefully it will do the same for whomever reads it.
Thanks again for your candid, haunting and captivating post, Kim. Yet I’m sorry about the horrific tragedy that inspired it.
Be well,
GL
Hi Greg,
Thank you so much for your comment.
I traveled widely in Asia as a young woman, spending a lot of time in Bangkok because my parents lived there at the time. Sex trafficking is alive and well there. I saw some despicable behavior close up, particularly from some of the German tourists. It did haunt me for quite awhile.
I can imagine how awful the research for your novel was, and I give you a lot of credit for doing that. Books about such things are important because so many people just look the other way and pretend it isn’t happening in 2017.
Now that Sherin’s body has been found (the police have all but said it is her) and her father has been arrested, it feels like a big weight has at least shifted. I’m very glad the courts did not return the older sibling to the mother yesterday, since there are still so many unanswered questions. Speculation runs rampant around here that the father may actually be covering for her, which would explain the ridiculousness of his original story. It is just speculation, though. I have hope that the truth will come out eventually, and that there will be justice for that poor child.
Heartbreaking. On all counts. Thanks for your reply. Time to write into the pain to help relieve it.
During the summer before my sophomore year of college, my father suddenly died. Two days after burying him, a boy I loved intensely, who had promised to come to the funeral but never showed, broke up with me over the phone. I don’t remember the six months that followed very well. I know I engaged in some destructive behavior and I’m surprised I managed to pass any of my classes.
Despite this being twelve years ago, I can’t bear to write about a situation like that. I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about writing about a fragile young woman enduring that level of loss. But I can’t. Even now, it’s too painful.
Oh, Suzanna, I can’t even imagine that level of grief all at one time. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to write about it directly. It could be, though, that you will be able to tap into the feelings that you had at that time and bestow them on a character living through a different, though equally painful, experience?
I could not write Sherin’s story, or anything close to it, without feeling I was exploiting the situation for my own gain. I do, however, have a child who goes temporarily missing in my current WIP. I can use some of what I experienced to enhance the scene that is already there. No helicopters, since it was 1914, but the heaviness…that has been unbearable, and I don’t even have a connection to the family other than living in the same general area.
Hi, Kim:
Sorry to be late to the comment thread. I think any story where a child is harmed or killed is rough business. Yes, we know it happens. Yes, it reveals something about human nature. And the truth, no matter how repellent, is always worthy of exploration. But I wonder if non-fiction isn’t the proper place for that. I’m not at all sure.
In trying to think through how I might fictionalize this, I believe my focus would be on how fragile we are, and how a single moment’s lapse can have devastating consequences.
I teach in a California prison. Five of my students are murderers (that I know of — there might be more). Two of those killings took place in a drunken or drug-induced rage. Those two men are two of the most insightful guys in my group.
But they didn’t kill children, and that’s what makes your story so hard. To write a novel is to live an extended dram — or nightmare. That’s a pretty awful nightmare to live with all the months it would take to get it right.
Thanks for the post. It’s made me think deeply about some important things.
David,
There are updates on this case just about every minute it seems. The father turned himself in last night and has changed his story, though it still reeks of a lie to me. Now he says he tried to give her milk in their garage and she refused. Eventually she started to drink it, but he chose that point to “physically assist” her. She started choking/coughing and then stopped breathing. He confessed to removing the body from the home. He still insists he never woke his wife, even though she’s a nurse and might have been some real help in the situation.
If he’s lying, the medical report will likely show that. Police aren’t ruling out a change in the charge (Injury to a Child) or the chance that another arrest may be made.
I can understand how a moment of rage can get out of hand, and I’m sure that those two men you work with have some interesting stories to tell. I’m not sure how I’d feel in the presence of a known murderer…does it frighten you?
I believe you may be right about stories like this being more of a non-fiction idea. I definitely couldn’t write that, or anything like that. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I personally profited because of someone else’s tragedy.
Oh Kim, this is so heartbreaking. It’s always hard when something tragic hits our neighborhood/community. It feels so personal, even when it’s not technically “our” story. Maybe even more so for writers, because of how deeply we tend to tap into our empathy.
Our community is still reeling over this, Kristan. My younger daughter wanted to know where Sherin was found, so I drove about a minute and a half to the spot to show her. It’s a shrine now. Flowers, teddy bears, balloons. It’s a tiny little culvert, within sight of two streets and several houses. I can’t imagine how the people who live there must be feeling. Lots of people stop there to pay respects or to pray.
Heartbreaking, for sure.